Brady Corbet: ‘It’s a fucking film’

Over six years in the making, three and a half hours long shot on 70mm with a 15-minute intermission and focused on a Hungarian architect escaping the terror of 20th century fascism for a new life in America – The Brutalist ticks a lot of arthouse epic boxes. It sounds like the sort of film that social media blowhards joke about film bros loving, and yet Brady Corbet’s third feature, co-written with his wife Mona Fastvold, is an elegant, searching, bracingly human experience, anchored by Adrien Brody’s magnificent turn as Lázsló Tóth and Corbet’s singular vision. But, as Corbet explains, mounting a film as truly ambitious as The Brutalist was an architectural feat in itself.

This is the longest film that I’ve ever made, and I’ve had to watch it from start to finish many, many more times than I have any other film. I’m supervising the creation of all of the 35 and 70 millimeter prints, and then because it’s an organic process. No one except maybe my editor, knows the film quite as obsessively as I do, and so things happen: there’s a dropped frame, there’s some other issue. Then you have to start over and make a new reel. It’s a lot of work – and I realized that I couldn’t really get a sense of the rhythm and flow of the entire movie unless I started at the beginning, which was so, so annoying. I am truly sick of it. [laughs] I think that you spend so many years dwelling on these themes, on this process, and I just can’t wait to have a little bit of mental space free up.

Also I just need a rest. My wife and I wrote a musical that she was directing this summer, and I directed all the second unit for it, and Daniel, our composer, he wrote all the songs – it’s about the Shakers, about Anne Lee emigrating from Manchester to the United States in the 18th century – and it was a really grueling job as well. Normally, we don’t have this level of overlap with projects, and because I was still in full-on post-production, I was mixing and grading and doing the network grade and supervising the print at the same time that I was shooting for her and producing her movie with her…it was really a lot, and then I expected this film to be released six to nine months after we premiered, because, it didn’t seem like the type of movie that anybody would be in a real rush to put out, but then all of a sudden it became very clear that the best time really was now.

And I’m very grateful that people are covering The Brutalist, because I genuinely believe that if the film does even just okay, commercially speaking, that it’s a huge win. The movie was not made for very much money, so for it to sort of justify itself, and erase our debt, we don’t have to do crazy numbers. Then maybe people will think, Oppenheimer at three hours long was not a fluke.

At the start of the summer, before anyone had seen it, they heard the movie was three and a half hours long and it was like a bullet to the head. But Oppenheimer, regardless of how people felt about it, it was an extremely good thing for the movie industry. And I think it would be really great to recognise there’s still an audience for movies about adults, for adults – movies that really have something on their mind. I really struggle with how many of the folks that have the power to green light a project operate from a place of fear, because the issue is that, as a result of fewer people going to the cinemas, everyone has become especially risk averse. It becomes a very vicious cycle where people also stop showing up for things because there’s nothing original for them to show up for.

And as a parent with no savings account, I can say that even for us, going to see a film in the theater is a choice. By the time we pay for a taxi, pay for child care, get dinner, concessions, whatever – it’s expensive. So I really feel like it needs to be an event, like it needs to be something that demands to be seen on the big screen. I would just want to do everything I possibly can to help that experience along, because, as a fellow cinephile, I think that it’s quite frightening. And also what we experienced during COVID, the idea that we could lose so many of these institutions, was really upsetting.

I spent so many years genuinely concerned that Kodak would go out of business, because when it comes to celluloid, there are certain fixed costs with manufacturing the stock in particular, that they just can’t do it for less. Kodak is so great about working with filmmakers to try and make it work. And the thing that’s so psychotic is that film on this movie accounted for maybe 1.5% or so of our film’s total gross budget. So I think it’s kind of insane that you have to defend this line item all the time, which is the film. I find it so weird. Why would we prioritize anything before the film itself? It’s a fucking film. It goes to film festivals, you know, it’s the Motion Picture Academy of Film.

So many people in Hollywood have very liberal politics, and yet they have a very conservative response to anything cultural. And for me, these things are not separate. For me, it’s equivalent to canned vegetables being served in schools all over America, where I’m like, of course these kids don’t like their vegetables, because they’ve never had a fresh vegetable. They don’t know what it is. I find it insane that so few people seem to see the direct link between what happens to the culture when you are poisoning them all the time. I thought liberals were supposed to be liberal, and right now, in every way, it feels like liberals are more conservative than they’ve ever been historically.

But to say something that’s a little bit less cynical, I love that the medium of film brings me together with people of all different backgrounds, all different ages. I have real relationships and I’m able to work frequently with people that are in their 70s or 80s, on every aspect of the movie, whether it’s the camera team or we’re making the score with. That is the one aspect of it which I find rather life affirming because it’s easy to dwell on all of the obstructionists that make it very, very difficult to make a movie. But that actually is the exception to the rule. Almost every movie has an antagonist – sometimes there’s multiple antagonists – but I think that overall, out of the 300 people that are contributing their time to these projects, most have their heart in the right place, and are all working towards a common goal, which is something you dreamt up in your bedroom. That is pretty moving and never lost on me and I don’t take it for granted.